Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

Two of the fundamentals of village life have been expounded, I hope: Custom, which is the Law, and says that what you did the day before yesterday is sanction for doing it the day after to-morrow; that, and exact mutual knowledge of your own and your neighbours’ affairs. There is a third: common poverty. Everybody is poor--or if he is not, he must seem so. That is invariable, for where everyone is poor, and everyone’s affairs known to everyone else, a very jealous eye is kept for any variation from the standard. Poverty--and by poverty I mean the state where you never have quite enough for the week’s expenses, are never more than a week’s pay off “the Parish,” and have to trust to windfalls for mere necessaries--that kind of poverty is a state which can only be borne in company. In the village it is the general state, and while that is so the villagers will put up, it seems, with almost anything. Custom, which assures them that it was like that for their forefathers, enables them to accept their continual privations. I daresay there is nobody in the village, of cottage rank, who has ever known an ordinary day when he was not hungry after a meal. They say that that is good for you. My only comment is, Try it, and it won’t seem to be so. They will stand that; and being cold in bed; and letting the fire out when you are not cooking something--so that you come home wet and tired to cold ashes, and must chop kindling before you can be warm or dry; and working incessantly, as the women do, for almost nothing or literally nothing; and wearing the same clothes until they fall off you; and washing at the sink downstairs because you are too tired to take water upstairs; and having windows that won’t open, and doors that won’t shut--but why go on? Worse things than any of these are endured in the slums of great towns. The village makes little of them, provided that they are shared; but the moment it knows, or has cause to suspect that any one of its number has had “a stroke of luck,” come into money, had a useful present made him, or found a well-paid job, then it is at once dissatisfied with its lot, and the lucky offender hears about it. It is not that village people are naturally unkind to each other--far from that, they are kindness itself in times of trouble. But they are incurably suspicious, and quicker to believe ill than well of each other. They grudge prosperity to a neighbour less than resent it. It seems a slight upon themselves. A hot and bitter question surges up, Why should that good fortune happen to her; and what have I done to be left out? By some queer jugglery of the mind, the first half of the question answers the second half; the happy one is so at the expense of the less favoured. If you engage a girl in the village for some daily task, her friends, as likely as not, will cut her in the street. I knew a woman in Norfolk whose husband was killed by a fall from a straw-stack. Compensation, insurance, club-money, presents from the benevolent flowed in to the widow, whose neighbours saw her not only free as air, but comfortably off according to village standards. They called her “the Lady,” and some of her own family would have nothing to do with her.

Indiscriminate or heedless present-giving should therefore be avoided, unless you wish harm to come to the object of your alms. There was a man in a village over the hill who was doing a turn of work in the house of a newcomer, a rich young man with the most friendly intentions. Talking to his labourer one day and noticing his unconventional leg-covering, it suddenly shot across his mind that he had lately tried on a new pair of trousers and taken them off again in a rage because of their cut. “By George,” he thought, “I like this chap. Now I’ll give him those beastly trousers”--which he did. On Sunday, then, there shone upon the church-going village young Richard in the newest pair of trousers it had ever seen, except, of course, upon the legs of a “gentleman,” where they would have been simply unremarkable, _hors concours_. But now it was as if a private in a file should show up there in a cocked hat with feathers. The trousers were glossy from the iron, they caught the sun. The creases before or behind would have cut a swathe. In the after-dinner time, when some favoured corner hums with youth, it hummed to only one tune; and on Monday the children going to school called out after young Richard, “Who stole my trousers?” It will now be understood why no village can be found without its miser. Between hiding and hoarding there is only a difference of degree. The first is forced upon the villager, for public opinion is too many for him; he dare not let it be known that he has anything to put by. The mattress used to be the favourite place for your economies. If it is not used now it is simply to save the waste of good ticking which always followed a death. Now it will be a hole under the hearthstone, or in the thatch, or a _cache_ under the third gooseberry bush as you go down the garden. Sometimes it is so well hidden that, if death be sudden, it is never found at all. Sometimes the hider will forget where he hid his money, and dig up the whole garden in the middle of the night. Mr. Pepys was in that predicament and, so feverishly did he hunt, lost quite a number of broad pieces. But the worst case is where he knows the hiding-place exactly, and going to recover his treasure, finds that somebody else had known it too; and so it has gone. Cruel dilemma! He dare not let his loss be known, nor, should he be able, accuse the thief. His only remedy in such circumstance is to steal from the stealer. I heard of an old woman who was robbed of twenty pounds, which she kept in an old beehive, and who knew perfectly well where the money was. She said nothing at all, continued her acquaintance, and even used to have the thief to tea with her. I don’t know how it was done--whether it dawned upon the guilty that she was suspected, and so compunction came. Anyhow, as I was told, the money was restored.

It may seem odd that when a villager rises in the world, as they often do, he ceases to be grudged. I am not sure that he really does; but no signs of grudging appear, simply because he ceases to be a villager. Rank is carefully observed--but it is all outside. There is no rank in the village itself. All are level there--except in one way. And that exception is not odd, either.

Walking down the street at certain hours of the day you will meet certain old men, elders of the people. Although they differ in no respect from any others you may find there, you will notice this about them that they will be “Mr.” to everyone, and not, as is usual, Jack, Tom, or Jimmy. What has procured them their title of honour? Not always age, certainly never riches: as often as not the bearer of a title will be an old-age pensioner. Or he may be “on the rates.” It doesn’t matter. Some native worth or resident dignity forbids the use of his Christian name, which is otherwise of invariable application. That points to a real aristocracy, an aristocracy of character; the only one which can hope to be permanent, as founded upon reason and nature; and the one without which no democracy can expect to be permanent either. Walking with one of these patricians the other day, I observed before us a man of near his age. Presently there came towards us an urchin homing from school, who passing our front rank, a man old enough to be his great grandfather, lightly acclaimed him with “Afternoon, George.” But to my companion it was, “Afternoon, Mr. M----.” With the women--married, of course--the decencies are observed in salutation, but not in reference. You will hear of one as old Liz Marchant, of another, always, as Mrs. Catchpole, or whatever her name may be. But, to each other, married women are strict formalists. Two girls who have known each other from childhood and been at school together will be Florry and Bess to the very church-porch. From the wedding day onwards, if they should live to be a hundred, they will be “Mrs.” to each other. That would fill me with wonder if I did not know how seriously the married state is taken in the village, the more so, I don’t doubt, because the single is more free than is convenient. Marriage, we say, sets right every irregularity. Perhaps it does; but in these parts it effectively prevents there being any more.

I have been expounding, it should be seen, what are virtually the manners and customs of a nation widely different from that of most of my readers. It is not really an economic, but an historic difference; for the longer I study it the clearer it becomes that the village does not differ in any essential respect from its remotest original, the Neolithic settlements on the tops of these hills. From where I live, a quarter way up the chalk down, I could conduct the inquirer to three or four vestiges of communities exactly like this one. I could point out the holes in which they lived, the track by which they drove their flocks to and from the watering places, which are still _in situ_ and still used. I could lay a wreath on the mound which covers their dust, or I might by a chance of the spade uncover their bones, not dust yet. There has never been discovered, so far as I am aware, anything to show that any one man of that nation lorded it over his fellows. Lords and masters enough there have been since. From the time when the Alpine race invaded our country the Iberian stock which underlies us all has never lacked a master. _But they have none now._ They have employers, hirers, not masters. So far as I can see the West Country village community is now once more just where it was fifteen hundred years before Christ, or thirty-five hundred years ago. It is in the valley instead of on the hill, it is professedly Christian instead of heathen. But it is still guided by tradition, and governed by common opinion, and as near a democracy as may be: a democracy tempered by character.

THE CURTAINS

Your pair of muslin curtains, given time and place, may cost you anything in the region of four, eleven, three, as the shop will tell you; but if you add to that domestic calm, the amenities and a raw sconce they soon mount up. That was what they cost a man I know, and I say that they are not worth it. For, not to dwell for a moment upon his particular pair, muslin curtains don’t fulfil the whole duty of curtains, but only a part of it, and the wrong part. They prevent you from seeing out of the window, which is the last thing you want of them in the country; they don’t prevent other people from seeing into it--which is the first thing. Particularly when you have the lamp alight. For instance, the other evening the whole village was informed inside of an hour that Mrs. Hobday, a young and pretty woman, had been trying on a hat with one hand and powdering her nose with the other. She herself was the last to know it, and the last to be allowed to forget it.

The Hobdays’ neighbours are the Cosseys, and Mrs. Hobday and Mrs. Cossey from the first were bosom friends. That was very important if life were to be what you might call life, for the two front doors are under one lintel, and, said Mrs. Cossey, “’tis such close living that if you weren’t one thing you must be t’other.” But they were always the one thing until the affair of the curtains, though Mrs. Cossey was large and plain-faced, and Mrs. Hobday pretty and small; though Mrs. Cossey had two children and Mrs. Hobday was only expecting. However, from the very first we were told ’twas all as pleasant as pleasant. They lived in each other’s houses, listened to each other’s tales of courtship and marriage, admired each other’s washing, and shook sympathetic heads over the unreasonableness of each other’s husband. There were no clouds in the sky, nor the makings of them. The Cosseys had an Axminster, but the Hobdays a new drugget. Mrs. Cossey had a copper kettle, Mrs. Hobday a silver teapot. Things were “just so,” neck and neck, and nothing to choose between them, when you came to add things up. O sweet content! And then, one mild morning, Mrs. Cossey was offered a seat in a motor-car going into town, and accepted.

It was a fine day; she was elated by her drive. Market-day, too. She felt like going it, and she went it. Away flew five shillings on a pair of muslin curtains which were selling like hot cakes at a stall. Mrs. Cossey bought other things, but nothing to count. The curtains fair set her up, they did. She felt as though she were treading on air. Wherever she went about the town that day she had an eye for the windows, and saw nothing better anywhere. “I’ll make Fred put ’em up after dark,” she promised herself. “’Twill be a surprise for Mrs. Hobday in the morning.” It was.

When Mrs. Hobday saw her friend’s front-room window she felt her heart jump, then stand still. But she knew what was due to herself, and let not a sigh escape her. Mrs. Cossey found her busy on her knees over the doorstep, busier certainly than she had ever been before. It became necessary to call her attention to the curtains, which somehow took the edge off them. You can’t explain it, but so ’twas. Then, of course, Mrs. Hobday admired; and when she had admired enough, she was told all about it; and when she knew all about it she said no more, but excused herself for being busy, and withdrew. Nor, if you will believe Mrs. Cossey, was she seen again for two days and nights; never so much as put her head outside the door. But Mrs. Cossey did not know how she had wept on Hobday’s shoulder that evening of discovery, how she had pleaded (as they used to do at Assizes, poor things) her condition, and how Hobday had said she shouldn’t want for anything, if it cost him ten shillin’--which it did. She knew nothing of all that; but in two days’ time, when she stood at her front door, and, happening to look at her neighbour’s window, might, so she said, have been knocked down with a feather--then indeed she knew all the blackness of Mrs. Hobday’s heart.

Whatever she might have been knocked down with, she herself used a club, that is to say, most injurious words. The whole village heard them, at second-hand, from Tom Crewkomb, the sweep, who had been passing at the time. Warmed by eloquence, it seems, and her growing sense of triumphant suffering, Mrs. Cossey called Mrs. Hobday a saucy young piece; whereat Mrs. Hobday, as if whipped, struck out blindly and said that Mrs. Cossey was no better than she should be. It may have been true--it is true of most of us; but Mrs. Cossey took it to heart and, refusing all nourishment, could do nothing but repeat it to herself over and over again. The pair of cottages, resplendently curtained as they might be, became a house of lamentation. The breaking-point was reached when Hobday came home to tea, and being again wept upon, pushed fiercely into next door and called Mrs. Cossey to her face an old tantamount--a terrible word, whose implication no man could possibly know. For end thereof, not despondency but madness: for when Cossey understood that Hobday had called his wife a tantamount, he waited for him outside, and gave him what he called a pair of clippers over the ear. Hobday was a light-weight, and did his best, but he could not get near Cossey; and he went to grass. Mrs. Hobday had hysterics, and asked for the doctor; and then (such is human nature at its best) Mrs. Cossey ran in to her, called her a lamb, and put her to bed.

It is a boy.

Mrs. Cossey and Mrs. Hobday have better things to admire in each other now. But Mrs. Hobday knows that her curtains cost more. So also does Hobday.

HAPPINESS IN THE VILLAGE

Not far from me there lives a man with wife and child in a tenement not much better than a cowshed. It is exactly two rooms of a wooden building, with no other conveniences of any kind, not so much as a copper for the washing. It is built into a ledge cut out of the southern slope of the valley, consequently never looks the sun in the face. I know that the rain falls through into the bedroom. If one dared one would have the place condemned, if to do that would not condemn to the workhouse those who shelter there. Yet I have known those poor things envied. At a certain hour of the afternoon the wife comes to her open door, the child in her arms. After five minutes’ watching, she sets the little creature down to totter up the road, down which comes a man, homing from his work. He too is on the look-out, and stands to admire. Then, when they meet, he picks up the baby, sets it on his shoulder, and back they go together to mother at the door. I have known that envied, I say, by the childless, by the unhappily mated, and by those whose days for children are over and done. Life has that in store for some of us, and I don’t know that it has anything better. An allegory, that, in its way.

Four years ago, when Agriculture had a Wages Board, and hopes were high that a _carminis aetas_ was opening for our oldest industry, a club was formed among the members of the Board for the ventilation of ideas. It was a gallant adventure, maintained with spirit so long as the parent Board was suffered to endure. Political exigencies, however, determined its existence, and with it perished the Agricultural Club. Now its president and virtual founder, Sir Henry Rew, has published its remains in “The Story of the Agricultural Club” (P. S. King and Son), and we are able to judge of the remedies proposed for a sick profession. It may shortly be said of the club, as of the deceased board, that its very existence did more service to agriculture than any of its recommendations, if only because it was solid in Pall Mall while its remedies were, and largely remain, in the air. In that fine room of Schomberg House, which happens to have been Gainsborough’s studio, there met on the eve of every Board-meeting representatives of the landed interests from all England, squires, tenant-farmers and farm labourers, on terms of that complete equality which only clubmanship can guarantee. How extraordinary that was is illustrated by Sir Henry Rew as follows:

“A year ago I had occasion to attend a meeting in the market
town of a typical agricultural district. It purported to be
a conference between the representatives of farmers and of
farm-workers with regard to a dispute then in progress. I was
shown into the conference room, where I found the farmers
assembled in force round a large table, and I was honoured with a
seat at the head of the table by the side of the chairman. After
some discussion among themselves, the chairman announced that they
were ready to receive the representations of the workers. About
half a dozen of them entered, and were ranged on a form against
the wall at the lower end of the room. The Chairman addressed them
civilly enough, but with much the same air of condescension as
a magistrate assumes in speaking from the Bench. I am sure that
no offence was intended or taken. The position seemed perfectly
natural to both parties. It was the normal and habitual relation
of master and man in discussion.”

It is fair to conclude, with Sir Henry, that the Wages Board and its club were “the expression of a new relationship,” not that of “master and man,” but rather of “man and man”; and it is not difficult to say what that may imply in latter-day village life. I am prepared by observation to say that at least it implies a definite heightening of status for the farm-labourer, of which he is very well aware. But whether it will work out for village prosperity and (a very different thing) village happiness, is still a matter of various opinion--opinion which is reflected in the papers read before the assembled club, and in the ensuing discussions.

These papers, as one might expect, are mainly practical in purpose. They deal with education, principally technical; they deal with cottage-building, not very fruitfully; they offer proposals for the formation of village-clubs; they touch, but gingerly, upon the ownership of land. The avowed ends of every proposition are two: how to keep the labourer in the village, and how to make him happy when he is there. It seems to me that readers and debaters alike fell into the common error of confusing prosperity with happiness, and happiness with pleasure. The mistake is fundamental. If all men of pleasure were happy men, legislation might accomplish what philosophers have failed to do. If excitement had no reactions, then let village clubs abound and young ploughmen dance all night! Bread and circuses are within the discretion of Parliament, but not prosperity, and not happiness. A man must work for his happiness “as some men toil after virtue”; and the education which he must receive in order to attain it is in another technic than that which has been in the mind of the Club. The young villager must acquire mental alacrity, he must learn to be temperate, and he must get charity. Having those, he may pick up happiness like gold off from Tom Tiddler’s ground, for the world is full of it. All the specifics of the Agricultural Club are palliatives of his lot, “consolatories writ.” The elementals remain--to be sought elsewhere.

The virtues of the villager are well known. They are such as to deserve and frequently to obtain happiness, but they do not tend to his prosperity in the Club’s sense. Nationalise the land to-morrow, and parcel it out in small holdings next week; by next year more than half of it will have run to waste. On the other half, for nine men who gain a bare subsistence off it there may be one who will do well. What is lacking? Mental alacrity. The peasant can plod with the best, rise early, work till dark; but he will do the thing to-morrow which he did yesterday. Mental sloth is temperamental: probably the Iberians had it. But there is nothing to prevent him from being happy; very many of them are so, and more than you might expect. Farm-labour, like farming, is a way of life; and so is happiness, in the sense that the kingdom of Heaven may be within you. One might go so far as to say that the prosperity of which the labourer dreams would rather diminish his store of happiness than increase it. Some of the wisest of my friends of the village feel sure of it. There are men about here who have risen in the world, as they call it, and are not conspicuously better citizens, nor more contented ones for that. Getting and spending, they lay waste their time. The wise villager sees it, and if he would rather be happy than prosperous is in the way to remain so. In that resolve the papers of the Agricultural Club cannot help him. The elementals remain. Others abide our question, but not those.

OTHERWHERENESS

The man whom I found one day in the reading-room at the Club, searching the Court Guide to find out his own name, was quite good-tempered about it. It had suddenly occurred to him to send a telegram, and he had written it out: when it came to signing it he was beat. I told him at once what I believed his name to be; he verified it in Boyle. “I might have had to get a dressing-room,” he said. “It isn’t one of those things which you can ask the hall-porter.”

The really absent-minded are not irritated by those intrusions of the supra-liminal self. The sub-liminal so pleasantly employs them, habitually, that they can afford to put up with the other’s impertinence. But occasionally he goes too far, as he certainly did with a dear and vague friend of mine when, horribly involved with a fishing line and a fly-hook in his sleeve, he hastily put his eye-glass into his mouth and his cigarette into his eye. Then indeed he broke into a flood of imprecation, so very unlike himself that one part of him “which never was heard to speak so free” really shocked the other part. “Oh, shameful, shameful!” I heard him say, and the profaner part was silenced. Here, of course, the whole assembled man was no further away than the whereabouts of the fly-hook, and not at all pleasantly occupied. Mostly, as Lamb says of his good friend, George Dyer:

“With G. D., to be absent from the body, is sometimes (not to
speak it profanely) to be present with the Lord. At the very
time when, personally encountering thee, he passes on with no
recognition--or, being stopped, starts like a thing surprised--at
that moment, reader, he is on Mount Tabor--or Parnassus--or
co-sphered with Plato--or, with Harrington, framing ‘immortal
commonwealths.’”

If he interrupted those happy sojournings, as he did once, to make a call in Bedford Square, and on learning that no one was at home, solemnly to sign his name in the visitors’ book, it is not at all surprising that, wandering on and on, he should presently find himself again in Bedford Square, again inquire for his friends, again ask for the visitors’ book and be brought up short, on the point of signing it again, by his own name scarcely dry--as if, says Lamb, “a man should suddenly encounter his own duplicate.” He may have been a little mortified, I daresay, but--it was worth it. A thing of the same sort happened to a very delightful lady of my friends--a lady of commanding presence, but occasional remarkable absences too. She went to call at a house in Eaton Square, no less, and found herself, when the door was opened by a footman, totally deprived of the name of the houselady. What did she? There was a moment of heart-beating and wild surmise; and then, with a smile of ineffable courtesy and sweetness, she held out her hand to the wondering man, pressed his own warmly as she said “_Good_-bye,” and sailed serenely away to resume her commerce with the infinite. Such commerce, I know, she had. She told me the story herself, and saw nothing amiss with it. Nor was there anything amiss. She was one who could do simple things simply--which is a great and rich possession; but occasionally she presumed upon it--as when she assured herself of the same virtue in her daughters and expected them to carry out her simplifications. That, of course, was a very different thing; but I don’t think she understood it. There is this also to be said, that women are much less self-conscious than men and do not go in such terror of being made ridiculous. Tell me of a man who could enter his drawing-room full of guests, and discovering himself without, say, his teeth, could laugh in the first face his eye encountered. “Forgive me--one moment--I must get my teeth”--tell me of such a man. _Mutatis mutandis_, I have been told of such a woman--and a great lady she was, too--by somebody who was there. It was not teeth, however.

The best of men--the George Dyers, whom, happily, we have always with us somewhere or other--are as content as most women with their natural destiny. George Dyer dined one night with Leigh Hunt at Hampstead, dined, talked, and took his leave. Twenty minutes later the knocker announced a late-comer. It was G. D. “What is the matter?” asked Hunt. “I think sir,” said Dyer, in his simpering, apologetic way, “I think I have left one of my shoes behind me.” He had indeed shuffled it off under the table, and did not discover his loss until he had gone a long way. As I read that story, which is Ollier’s (but I get it from Mr. Lucas), G. D.’s apologetics were directed to Hunt, whose rest he had disturbed, by no means to himself. A man less sublimely lifted was one with whom I had been staying in a Scotch country house. We came away together, and half-way to the station he struck himself on the forehead, and “Good God!” he said, “I have tipped the same man three times!” It appeared too true that he had: once in his bedroom, once in the hall, and once at the carriage door. Now he, if you like, was excessively mortified, and his reason may well have been that he had not been better employed, on Helikon or elsewhere, when he might have been noticing menservants. He was as blind as a bat, poor man, and a sense of infirmity may have stung him. The otherwhere men have no sense of infirmity--on the contrary, one of great gain. An ampler æther, a diviner air is theirs in which to exercise.

But of all divinely preoccupied men the best--unless Dyer be the best--is Brancas--the Comte de Brancas of whom you may read in Saint-Simon, in the Correspondence of “Madame,” and in Tallemant des Réaux. Brancas was to the Paris of the _Grand Siècle_ what Dyer was to the London of the Regency, or Dr. Spooner to the wits of my younger days. La Bruyère, summarising him as _Ménalque_, overdid his study, and made him appear like the clown in a circus who gets horribly involved in the carpet, or kicks away the hat he stoops to pick up. It may be perfectly true that Brancas went downstairs, opened his front door, and shut it again, thinking that he had just come in--that I can perfectly understand. It is a thing I might have done myself. But to add to it that he presently discovered his nightcap on his head, his stockings down about his ankles, and his shirt outside his _chausses_, is to spoil the story. Never mind, he is out in the street finally, and walking briskly along, with his mind leagues away. By and by he is brought up short by a violent blow on the nose. “Who has attacked me?” he cries. Nobody. He has walked fiercely into the tilt of a market cart, which he had overtaken in his briskness. Or he goes to Versailles to pay his court, enters the _appartement_, and passing under the central chandelier, his perruque is caught and held there; but he forges along. The company gapes, then bursts into laughter. Brancas stops, looks inquiringly about, sees the swinging perruque and is delighted. “Whose is that?” He looks all about him to find the bare pate and exposed ears. Finally, of course, somebody claps it on his head. A good story, which may be true.

Two of them, at least, may be, as they are told by Madame in letters to her friends. Brancas went to church--to the _Salut_: he knelt down, and feeling in his pocket for his Book of Hours, pulled out a slipper which he had put there instead of it. Just outside the church, on leaving, he is accosted by a lackey who, with much deprecation, asks him if he happens to have taken Monseigneur’s shoe by mistake. “Monseigneur’s shoe!” It is the fact that he had paid a call upon a bishop that afternoon. “No, no--certainly not”--then he remembers that he has, in fact, a slipper in his pocket. His hand goes in, to make sure that it is there. It is; but so is another slipper--which is precisely--Monseigneur’s.

The next is even better. Brancas goes to mass at Versailles. He is late, and bustles up the nave between the kneeling company. He sees, as he thinks, a _prie-dieu_ facing the altar. Most convenient--just the thing. He hastens, throws himself upon it. To his amazement it emits a strangled cry, gives way before him, and he finds himself intricately struggling on the pavement with a stout lady. His _prie-dieu_ had been the Queen-Mother.

THE JOURNEY TO COCKAIGNE

I remember being taken ill in a small town on the Marne in 1906, desperately ill with copper poisoning. I say that I remember, as if there was a chance that I should ever forget it. The agony, the rigour and all the rest of it, were accompanied by high fever and delirium, which lasted all through a burning August night. It happened that a _fête nationale_ had possession of the town: there were a fair, a steam roundabout, a horrible organ accompaniment. The grinding, remorseless tune, the uproar, the slapping of countless feet (though I tried to count them) on the pavement wove themselves into my racing dreams. I seemed to be a party to some Witches’ Sabbath; and now, if I ever try to imagine Hell, it always comes out like that. A dry, crackling, reiterated business, without rest, without mirth, without hope, without reason. One suffered incredibly, one was desperately concerned; the brain was involved in it; the more frivolous it was the more deeply the mind must work. I knew it was a festivity; all the familiar features of revel were there--and all horrible. The mind was so tired that you seemed to hear it wailing for mercy; but it went on jigging after the organ. The feet of the dancers were burnt by the paving stones, yet never stayed. Some mocking devil possessed the people, rode them with spurs. There was no zest, yet no pause; and through it all was the blare of the organ.

Life in London, in Ascot week, struck me, coming up after six months in the country, as very much like that night of fever. There was the same dry crackling, the same strife of noise, the symptoms of mirth without reality. London, of course, is much too big to be generalised from. The best is hidden behind shut doors. It is the froth of the ferment that you see. But there is now too much froth; one wonders what is working in the lees.

Londoners, as you pass them in a cab, are a crowd; you don’t even suspect individuality there. They drift along the streets like clouds. The colours of them are so blurred down by the dust and din that they seem a uniform drab. Here and there a yellow jumper, or a grass-green sunshade catches the eye; but no personality behind it, no reasonable soul in human flesh subsisting. It requires stern attention on a fixed point if you would candidly consider your fellow creatures as London has made them, and, no doubt, been made by them. It happened to me that I was held up by a block in Piccadilly, at a favourable point between Bond Street and the arcade of the Ritz. Four o’clock on a glaring afternoon; tea-shops crammed; motor buses piled skywards like market-carts: extraordinarily over-dressed young men, and extraordinarily undressed girls were on the pavement, all very much alike, and all apparently of one age.

Observe that I have not seen London in the season since the Armistice. Well, it seemed to me that the scythe had mown down much that I used to know. Here instead was a saturnalia of extreme youth. I saw thin girls in single garments of silk, with long white legs and Russian opera shoes; and young men walking with them, looking curiously at them, or talking to them urgently at shop windows. The girls said little; they were not there to talk, but to be talked to; they accepted what was said as a matter of routine. Their eyes wandered from article to article displayed. They seemed to me as purposeless as moths hovering about flowers at dusk. Love, I suppose, was their food--it ought to have been; but neither they nor their lovers showed any of the pride or triumph, the joy or the longing of love. Love, for once, was not a new thing; the wonder had left it. Fever had dried up the juices of nymph and swain alike. It was like a dinner off husks.

Next day was the first of Ascot, and I watched for some time the endless procession of motors in the Hammersmith Road. I had often seen it before--I mean before the war. It had been a big thing then; but now it was a monstrous thing, a nightmare of going to the races. A continuous stream there was, of long, low, swift, smooth-gliding machines, never stopping, almost noiseless. They were all covered and glazed, all filled inside with doll-like, silent, half-clad, vaguely-gazing girls; with stiff and starched, black-coated, silk-hatted young men. I saw no one laughing; I thought the whole business a dream on that account; for, though you see and mix with crowds in dreams, there is never either talking or laughing. It was that absence of heart in the thing, or of zest for it, which made one so uncomfortable. Lavish outlay is rather shocking nowadays; but if you take away the only excuse for it, which is high spirits, it is much more than shocking; it is terrifying, it is hideous.

Where on earth, I asked myself, did the money come from? Who floated, and how did they float the balances at the banks? Every one of those motors must have cost a thousand pounds; every one of the chauffeurs (you could see at a glance) must have cost five pounds a week. The clothes, no doubt, you could have on tick; but not the champagne, and not the chauffeurs. From where I stood in Addison Road I could see, at the lowest, fifty thousand pounds’ worth of motors. And the stream, mind you, at that hour reached from Ascot to Piccadilly, and was repeating itself on the Fulham Road and the King’s Road, to say nothing of the Uxbridge Road. Who were those people? Were they all profiteers, or all in other peoples’ debt? It was very odd. In the county where I live we are rather put to it how to keep going. The great houses are mostly shut up or in the market; the smaller houses are all too big for their owners and occupiers. There is a scale of general descent. The marquesses let their castles, if they can, and go in to the manors; the squires let their manors, and convert the farmhouses to their domestic use. I leave my old Rectory and hide in a cottage. We are all a peg or two down. Income-tax and the rates had done their fell work when there came upon us a coal strike of three months long--a knock-out blow to many. Did it not touch London? Or were all those pleasurers Colonel and Mrs. Rawdon Crawleys who live at the rate of seven thousand a year, on tick? The Lord knows.

On the whole, I thought it well that the miners’ wives, in the scorching grey villages of Durham and the Tyne, were not standing with me in Addison Road that first day of Ascot. Or if South Wales and Lanark had been there! I should not have wished them let loose on London just then. Nothing was further from London’s mind than either of those vexed and seething provinces. It neither talked of them nor read about them. _The Westminster Gazette’s_ front page was entirely filled up with a cricket match; so, by the by, was the second. _The Times_--but since _The Times_ has become sprightly I confess it is too much for me. An elephant on hot bricks! Nowadays, if I want to read the news I must send to Manchester for it. Thence I learn that the coal strike is in its third month, the English and Irish still murdering each other, and the Government still throwing overboard its own legislation. Golf news, cricket, polo, lawn tennis I can have from _The Westminster Gazette_.

The sea saw that and fled; Jordan was driven back. I stood it for three days, then came home to find the mallow in flower in the hedges, and men and women still afield getting in the last of the hay. Wilts was being careful over many things, but Ascot and thin girls were not of them. In London I was puzzled by the way the money was flying; but I was shocked, not by that, but by the absence of zest for a time-honoured pastime. If only some young couple had laughed! Or made love as if it was the only thing in the world worth doing! But they were all as weary as the King Ecclesiast. That seemed to me the serious matter.

SUICIDE OF THE NOVEL

The epic faculty in us is never likely to atrophy, but will break out again presently in some unsuspected place; for while all men are children once, most of them remain so all their lives. Winter’s Tales will go on, because there will always be winter evenings, and the most interesting thing, next to playing at life, is to talk about it. “There was a man--dwelt by a churchyard ...”, or “Andra moi ennepé, Mousa....” So the romantic or the adventurous tale should begin, as it always did and always will. It is when he adds love to his chronicle of events and allows that to modify them that the tale-teller turns novelist and, in danger of over-sophistication, begins the road to Avernus; for love involves passion, and passion means sex, and sex invites curious philosophy, and philosophy calls in pathology; then comes Herr Freud with his abhorred complexes; and then you have something which may stimulate, may divert, may do you good, but (as the old tale goes) “is not Emily.” There is no love in the _Odyssey_, none in _Robinson Crusoe_, none worth talking about (only gallantry) in _Gil Blas_. The animalism in _Tom Jones_, as in Smollett’s gross tales, was but a vent for high spirits in a century which reckoned love among the appetites, and put women and claret roughly in the same category. Speaking only for my own countrymen, I doubt if sex took on its romantic aspect or became a final cause of narrative fiction until the latter half of the last century. In Walter Scott and Jane Austen it does not exist. It hardly exists in Dickens, hardly, except as a butt, in Thackeray. Trollope’s charming girls are satisfied with extremely little in the way of wooing. The Luftons and young Frank Greshams and Major Grantleys choose by liking, wait seven months or years for their Rachels, kiss them and go home--to write once in a while. Johnny Eames cherishes a flame--if it may be called a flame. We are asked to believe in Mr. Grey’s passion for Miss Vavasour--but do we believe it, or are we the less entertained for our strong doubts? No, indeed.

In the latter half of the last century, Rossetti wrote sensuous poetry of a kind which was new to English literature, very different, say, from that of Keats. Swinburne wrote sexual poetry, as I apprehend, of a highly theoretical kind. I don’t know exactly when Mr. George Moore began to write novels, but cannot recall any striking example of the French novel in English before his time, and should be inclined to commence our series of the grubby and illicit with him. George Meredith and Mr. Hardy were both well-established before that; but though there is passion in Meredith, and lyric passion too, and sex in Mr. Hardy, with much intensive imagining about it, _non ragioniam di lor_. They were alike in the old tradition. Neither Aphrodite or Priapus sat on the Muse’s throne. At the utmost they did but “donner la chemise!” Meredith and Mr. Hardy wrote stories, not sex-fantasias. Mr. Moore will do very well as an illustration of the change which came over our novels when Trollope ceased to write, the change which, as I say, made them French novels written in English. Before that change, love, sex, passion, as manifestations of life, had been part of the entertainment which the novel as a redaction of life had to offer. After it they _were_ the entertainment, and thereupon and thereby the novel ceased to be a redaction of life. For, _pace_ Herr Freud, all life is not sex. One resultant of the changed objective will account for that. There was no room for life in a sex-novel. If you set out to write a dithyramb of lust, or sex, your novel will be short. The subject is absorbing, once it takes hold of you, and the celebration of it will exhaust itself as the reality does. Such tales have always been short: _Daphnis and Chloe_, for instance, _Manon Lescaut_. One could not have filled the old three-decker with that kind of thing. Nobody except Richardson ever tried it. With the change of theme, then, conspired the change of form, and the bookseller and the novelist in a concatenation accordingly.

Other things followed of necessity. The novel ceased to be an interpretation of life and became a kind of poem. The preoccupied novelist wrote _à priori_. Observation ceased to procure novels to be written; the novelist, rather, stung by his gadfly into action, observed for his own purposes and those of his theme. His novel clothed his thought in appropriate draperies, to call them so, with which life had little or nothing to do. He did not in fact set up an image of life at all, but instead, a Hermes, on which he could hang garlands corresponding to his passion or indicative of his complaint. Novels of this sort, to call them so, are still being produced: I read three of them the other day, all written by women. One of them, which was “crowned” with a cheque for a hundred pounds, was a real pæan of sex: in the other two sophistication had set in. They did not so much hymn the function as “peep and botanise” upon its grave. The three were episodic, “all for love, and the world well lost.” The world indeed, for all that appeared, was standing still while half a dozen persons to a book were enacting their secret rites. If the end of all this be not despondency and madness it will be something quite as unpleasant.

That which led me into these speculations was Mrs. Stirling’s excellent memoir of her sister and brother-in-law, Evelyn and William De Morgan, that happily-mated pair. She tells in its place the manner in which De Morgan fell into the writing of novels, how without effort they came to him. They were certainly the last of our novels which have offered us a comprehensive reading of life. It seems absurd to say of them that they are able, because ability, in the common use of the word, implies the conscious exercise of it. De Morgan’s novels, however, seem effortless; they read as the most spontaneous things in the world, and Mrs. Stirling now says that they really were so. There is no apparent design, no contrivance. They are as formless as life itself.

“‘Be good enough to note,’ he says in one of them, ‘that none of
the characters in this story are picturesque or heroic--only
chance samples of folk you may see pass your window now, at this
moment, if you will only lay your book down and look out. They are
passing--passing--all day long, each with a story. And some little
thing you see, a meeting, a parting, may make the next hour the
turning point of existence.... This is a tale made up of trifles.’”

What he made of those stored and treasured-up trifles, with what humour, with what tenderness, what wisdom he combined and related them, what in fact was the harvest of his quiet eye, cannot be entered upon here. De Morgan had been harvesting for sixty-five years when he began! To me his books seem to be the wisest of our time. I know of none which, as Matthew Arnold said of Homer, produce the sense in the reader “of having, within short limits of time, a large portion of human life presented to him.” They contain--like the _Iliad_ in that, like _Tom Jones_, like _David Copperfield_ and _Vanity Fair_, and _War and Peace_--sufficient of the world to create in us a strong illusion of the whole labouring, blundering, groaning, laughing, praying affair.

But De Morgan is too good for the end of an essay--he who has inspired so many. And he will write no more of his friendly, wise and comprehending books. And he is not the point. The point is that the novelist has bled his art down and out by urging it to make a poem of itself instead of a digest. I say nothing now of the pamphlet and the tract. Those things also the novelist has done without leaving the other undone. He, or his novel, is now dying of exhaustion, self-induced. Worst sign of all--he is beginning to note his own symptoms.

IMMORTAL WORKS

An editor--one, that is, of a race suspect to my species; for, as the herbivores fear the carnivores, so is it with the likes of me and of him--an editor, I say, has lately spread his nets before me, inviting me to “a symposium of well-known poets and critics.” A banquet, I fear, like that last one of Polonius, “not where he eats but where he is eaten.” The subject of our symposium, the staple of our feast, was to be “What poets since Wordsworth, _especially what living poets_, and which one or two of their poems ... should be given a place in the Golden Treasury of English poetry.” Excellent, i’ faith! Will you walk into my parlour? said the spider to the fly. I am by this time a fly getting on in years. I dine out as little as may be, and have developed something of an intuitive sense which tells me whether I am to dine or to be dined upon. So I decline the invitation in the following terms:

“Dear Sir,--I deprecate such proposals as yours, because I cannot think them intended seriously, or (even if they are) likely to be taken so. It seems to me that you are inviting me less to a symposium than to an exhibition, in which I am to be an exhibit. You are asking me, among others, to grant immortality, or deny it, to certain living persons, many of whom are my friends or acquaintances. Entry into a Golden Treasury is the hall-mark of no less a thing, the end and aim of every poet in the world. Once there, a poet is a peer, a knight of a round table. And you expect me to make of myself a Fountain of Honour, to dub knights, deal round coronets? No, indeed, my dear sir. I am many bad things, but I hope not so arrogant, nor such an ass. No man living can predict immortality for his friend, though he may dearly wish that he could.

“It is not possible to be sure of current literature for the plain reason that local and temporary interests must inevitably bias the judgment. I don’t mean by that one’s interest in one’s friend. At this hour the war of 1914-18 is the most portentous thing we know or can think of. I would not mind staking a round sum upon the probability of nine out of ten of your banquetters selecting recent war poems by recent young warriors. And yet how many war poems are there in the existing Golden Treasury? _The Burial of Sir John Moore_, of course; but what others? And yet again, is it not only too possible that, before your new Golden Treasury were in the printer’s hands, another war would be burning out the memory of its forerunner, and wringing from us new war poems whose appositeness would make immortality more obviously theirs than of any which you had in type? You see? That is one of the difficulties in which you would land me, supposing that you were serious.”